1. Field of the invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of newspaper handling equipment and, more particularly, to method and apparatus used in bringing together or collating the various sections that comprise a typical modern-day, multi-section newspaper.
2. Description of the prior art
Today's bulky, multiple-section, large-city newspapers are extremely difficult to handle with automated equipment. A complete edition may sometimes weigh several pounds; yet it is floppy, easily torn and tends to become easily disassembled during handling and distribution. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly popular to provide these papers with a mass of slick advertising inserts and other materials that are difficult to handle in their own right and are hard to contain within the paper, further contributing to an already troublesome situation.
Larger newspapers, particularly Sunday editions, typically comprise several different groups of mutually nested sections which are often stacked on top of one another in superimposed relationship to form a complete, bulky newspaper. Sometimes, the different groups of nested sections may be contained within a final, outer "jacket" or "wrapper" which is formed by the "front page" section of the newspaper. It is the Sunday editions that most frequently contain the loose collection of advertising slicks and other inserts.
Most large newspaper printing presses have the capability of assembling sections and nesting them within one another up to a limited number of pages. However, from that point on, these different groups of nested sections must then be combined or collated with other nested groups of sections to make a complete newspaper edition. This is typically accomplished using a battery of several different automatic hoppers which are spaced along a common conveyor line to dispense different groups of the nested sections onto the conveyor in timed relationship with one another. Each of the hoppers successively dispenses the entire supply of one of the groups of nested sections onto the conveyor, and on top of other groups of sections coming down the line, so that by the time the end of the line is reached, the newspaper will be fully assembled, or nearly so. Each hopper holds several, identical groups of nested sections at a time and operates continuously to feed its successive groups of papers at regular intervals, corresponding exactly to the feed rate of the other hoppers. The hoppers must be continuously replenished with more groups of newspaper sections, either manually or through the provision of automatic loaders.
Automatic hoppers of this type are disclosed and claimed, for example, in my prior U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,777,907, 4,557,472 and 4,702,467, assigned to the assignee of the present invention. These hoppers have proven to be remarkably successful in coping with the inherent problems and frustrations of feeding bulky newspapers. Yet, there are times when even these hoppers have proven to be less than ideal.
For example, while my prior hoppers are each capable of operating at relatively high speeds and of handling a variety of different thicknesses of groups of the newspaper sections, there are still times when a misfeed can occur, causing the hopper to shut down. If only one hopper were operating, it would not be a particularly serious or difficult situation to deal with, since the misfeed could usually be cleared without too much difficulty and the hopper returned to service.
However, where a large number of the hoppers are teamed together to assemble a large newspaper in the manner described above, a misfeed in one of the hoppers has the effect of shutting down the entire system until the misfeed is cleared. This has a very serious impact on the total throughput of the system, i.e., the rate of finished newspapers coming off the end of the line can be very seriously affected. Thus, the percentage of time that the assembly line is idle may be relatively high, even though the likelihood of failure of any particular one of the hoppers is somewhat low. A misfeed by any one hopper normally requires instant attention and interruption of the work operation, although the attendants associated with the remaining hoppers may be unoccupied for some time.
In the newspaper printing and distribution business, time is almost always of the essence. Thus, shutdown of an assembly line, for any reason, is a serious matter and is to be avoided if at all possible. Certainly, the idle time during each shutdown must be minimized. While in the printing of Sunday editions, for example, it is the common practice to print some of the feature sections, the comics and advertising inserts several days in advance and to store them at a substation during the middle of the week, on Saturday night and early Sunday morning, those pre-assembled groups of sections must be finally assembled in a very short "window" of time with the main sections of the newspaper which are printed at the very last minute and contain late-breaking news and sports.
Another problem associated with currently available automatic hoppers is that they require some degree of skill in order to run them properly, correct misfeeds, and make adjustments. Typically, full-time, dedicated and skilled employees are not available in large numbers at the distribution substations, nor could they be economically afforded. Rather, part-time, unskilled workers at minimum wage levels are usually the only help available during the last minute rush to assemble large papers such as Sunday editions, many of whom are not particularly familiar with the procedures involved, and certainly not with the sophisticated mechanisms embodied in the automatic hoppers.
Furthermore, the newspaper sections, inserts and groups of sections are oftentimes not in a neat, squared-up configuration that can be readily handled by the automatic hoppers of conventional design. Frequently, they are disheveled and ratty with loose corners and edges projecting outwardly from the sides of the package presented to the machine. The machine itself has no ability to rearrange and straighten out the package, resulting in a sure misfeed or jamming situation. In this same regard, sometimes the sections and inserts presented to the automatic machine have not been properly nested within one another but instead are only piled or stacked up on top of each other. This causes the machine to either shut down because it cannot handle the loose materials, or it feeds the individual sections one at a time instead of in a group as intended, spreading the sections into several different newspaper editions instead of all into one.
Some efforts have been made to accomplish the assembly operations without the use of automatic hoppers at all. With that kind of arrangement, the number of workers are simply positioned along a common conveyor line with each worker manually taking different groups of the nested sections from their respective stacks, placing them on top of one another in a short group or stack, and then placing them on the rapidly moving conveyor. However, it was found using this technique that the workers quickly become mentally and physicially exhausted because careful movements and attentiveness are required in order to coordinate depositing the newspapers on the conveyor with the velocity and timing of the conveyor.